Puffbox

Well done to Charlie Beckett for getting his piece on Monday evening’s BBC Trust seminar online so quickly, practically before I’d left the building. And he managed to hit the nail on the head, when he says ‘consultation is a process not a product… in the new networked world’. Maybe that’s why we’re having so much trouble identifying the right way to make formal consultation work online: maybe the whole premise of the question is wrong.

Perhaps the only way to engage with the blogosphere is to be a part of it, and play by its rules. A BBC Trust blog, as a ‘continuous assessment’ exercise rather than an occasional fixed-period ‘examination’, would turn the spotlight on specific matters as they arose. The legalistic process demanded by the licence fee will always require a ‘final report’: perhaps this could be an end-of-year review of how various developments had been received, and the extent to which the BBC acknowledged it and (where appropriate) responded.

But what form should that blog take? For a while now, I’ve been working up an idea for ‘virtual group blogs’ (for want of a better term), whereby relevant posts on existing blogs could be aggregated into a single place – and this might be an ideal use case.

The Trust would take on the role of moderator, on several levels: choosing which bloggers to invite in, ensuring appropriate political and geographic balance among those bloggers, monitoring the suitability of individual posts, moderating the comments which would hopefully ensue. And with the bloggers being entirely free from BBC control, they would naturally be raising sensitive topics, in a way that Trust staff might not feel comfortable (despite their nominal independence). I’m pretty sure I know how this could be implemented technically, and it’s a lot easier than it probably sounds.

Many thanks to David Wilcox for the invite; and a pleasure to meet people like Charlie, Antony Mayfield and Mick Fealty in the flesh for the first time. Quite an odd experience to have such a significant percentage of my ‘blogroll’ all in the same room.

Media Guardian is reporting that ‘ITN is to launch a channel on YouTube to deliver a range of entertainment, sport and film programmes’: well, it didn’t take too much detective work to find the page, at youtube.com/itn.

Immediate thought: what does the N in ITN stand for these days? There’s no actual ‘news’.

Instead, the Guardian pieces tells us, ‘an average of five entertainment clips – the same as are provided by ITN On to customers such as MSN, Yahoo!, Virgin Mobile and 3 – will be posted on YouTube each day.’ There’s a weekly Bollywood Insider bulletin, and a daily (?) ‘EPL News’ football roundup…. clearly not aimed at a UK audience, for whom the name EPL is a joke. And anyway, since ITN doesn’t have the rights, the one thing you won’t actually see in the bulletin is any actual English Premier League football. Why are they even bothering?

(Incidentally: if you want proper EPL action, I heartily recommend the Virgin website – lengthy highlights packages in very good video quality, even blown up full-screen.)

The only really interesting bit is that ITN will be ‘one of the first UK media companies to exploit YouTube’s new in-video ad format’. I haven’t spotted any usage of it in the wild yet… but if you haven’t yet seen the adverts-on-video method, there’s an example on the Google blog.

The New York Times was caught last week testing the concept of putting real, actual readers’ comments on its homepage… and above the fold, too. (To quote my favourite film of all time: ‘don’t look for it, it’s not there any more.’) Very interesting development, but all sorts of implications – legal, financial, ethical – to it.

I’m not the slightest bit surprised to learn that the BNP website is the most visited UK political party site. Before anyone misinterprets, let me say I’m entirely opposed to their politics. But they are a real political party, with real seats on real democratic bodies, and they put forward real candidates in real elections (sometimes winning them too). The democratic purist in me says it isn’t acceptable to actively blank them. No wonder people actively look them up online, to see who they are, and precisely what they stand for: nobody else is telling us that. The website isn’t exactly up to much, but it’s there, and it contains the stuff if that’s what you’re looking for. But don’t misinterpret ‘high readership’ for ‘high support’: I dare say plenty of people, like myself, were looking out of sheer curiosity, rather than any kind of active or even passive support.

In the interests of left-right balance – the same goes for the Greens. They have even stronger representation, with two MEPs and a ‘real’ parliamentarian in Westminster, and their politics are increasingly mainstream – ask the Nobel committee. But then again, as long as they refuse to play the political game, they’re going to miss out on media coverage. They’re starting to ramp up their online activity (a blog, YouTube…) but I don’t personally believe it’ll be enough unless they opt to have a ‘proper’ leader when it’s put to the vote next month.

Monday will be an interesting test: the Greens are to announce the results of the elections for their chair and dual ‘principal speaker’ positions. A big deal. Will it get any kind of a mention?

It’s coming up to a year since Matthew Taylor, Tony Blair’s former chief adviser on political strategy, became chief executive of the RSA. As you may know, his mission is to turn the organisation into ‘a network for civic innovation’. Supporting him in this initiative is a group of similarly-minded individuals, calling themselves OpenRSA, who recently held their first ‘real world’ meeting.

I was struck by one particular passage in David Wilcox’s video recording of Matthew’s remarks to the group:

Part of the reason I was enthused by this idea is that I tried to do it at the Labour Party for ten years – and it was totally impossible. I spent ten years saying ‘can’t we turn our members into civic entrepreneurs? can’t we actually look like we believe in progressive change on the ground, rather than just knocking on people’s doors?’ The party leadership and party stakeholders were utterly resistant to this idea.

Granted, he wasn’t talking about web strategy exactly, but in these 2.0 days, I’m not sure there’s still a clear distinction between technology and grassroots empowerment.

Meanwhile, Labour gets a kicking (hardly the first!) from UK tech blog TechDigest, who declare it ‘very sad that our current Prime Minister and his Party have made the least amount of effort online. With that election coming ’round one day they better step up a gear or six.’

It’s common knowledge – and I know from conversations I had myself – that the party was on full ‘get ready’ mode, in case Mr Brown said ‘yes’. It can’t possibly have escaped their notice that the Tories, and arguably also the LibDems, were much stronger in the ‘online community’ game. They couldn’t have done much to turn it all round in three weeks; but 18 months ought to be plenty of time.

If you’re interested, I’ve posted my take on the Pre-Budget Report over at the BT Business blog – with (I think) appropriate political balance, given that it’s under a BT banner. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more comment generally about the pace of Darling’s delivery. The speech seemed to fly by, certainly in comparison to previous years. And was I the only one surprised to see how many Labour front-benchers failed to get a seat on the front bench? Browne, Miliband (E) and Benn were caught in cutaway shots, standing on the fringes.

I quite enjoyed Charlie Brooker’s assault on TV news on this week’s edition of BBC FOUR’s Screenwipe. A surprising amount of fond nostalgia, including a few laugh-out-loud moments I hadn’t seen before (and one or two we’ve seen too often). His specific criticisms – how TV whipped up the hysteria over Northern Rock, the lack of actual news in the Madeleine McCann case – were spot on, but if I’m honest, a bit predictable for anyone at all familiar with the industry. Still worth half an hour of your time though: if you missed it, try to catch one of the repeats on Friday and Saturday, or take a punt on the iPlayer.

(Speaking of which… I wonder how many people are actually using iPlayer? I’ve downloaded a grand total of one single show since the trial launched nearly three months ago. And that was only cos my TV was dead due to flood damage.)

Cutting it rather fine ahead of this afternoon’s financial statements, Sky News has posted a Flash-based ‘if I were Prime Minister‘ game, where you can move the public finances around, and see what Adam Boulton makes of your decisions. The game itself is a bit simplistic – just a bunch of sliders, really. But it’s a nice touch to see Mr Boulton doing a video piece-to-camera, outside No10, to give you your outcome. Now… what would be really clever would be if it built an aggregated ‘people’s CSR’ behind the scenes, to show us precisely where the public’s priorities lay?!

Didn’t see much mention of this last week… McDonald’s have announced plans to offer free wifi in 1,200 UK outlets by the end of the year. No sign of anything on McDonald’s or The Cloud’s sites. Very good news; I’m only just getting used to wifi working, and I’ve had trouble finding free hotspots in and around central London. The ICA is a cool place to hang out… but they don’t open until noon. Any other recommendations, anyone?

My (only just) 2-year-old daughter is currently complaining to Mummy that she wants to watch Dora The Explorer, but it isn’t on anywhere just now. You know what? She’s right. Why shouldn’t we expect to get the programme we want, when we want? Instead she’s having to put up with Fifi And The Flowertots, which I personally can’t stand. Possibly due to Jane Horrocks providing the nicey-nicey voiceover. Still haven’t forgiven her for that Mrs-Supermarket-Manager-Becomes-PM thing.